PORTLAND, ORE.- Rose Dickson uses shape and pattern to understand relationships of touch, unity, boundaries, overlap, tension, and violence. Employing a system of archetypal forms throughout her work, Dickson is engaged in a speculative alchemy using a range of media including paint, cast metal, wax, and ceramic that explore the qualities inherent in each form and the essential, transformative relationships they create when brought together. Night Vision, Dickson’s exhibition at Adams and Ollman and organized with Melanie Flood Projects, includes new two and three dimensional works.

Dickson’s work focuses on process to reveal a proto-language of emotional connectedness. Her abstract forms, simultaneously archetypal and futurist, share characteristics with the body, tools and ornament. In a series of new paintings, Dickson reveals parts of a hidden or forgotten order. Starting with flashe on panel that is then covered in a thick layer of beeswax to obscure the pattern or image, Dickson slowly carves into the surface, rediscovering parts of the original painting. In a near archaeology-like process, Dickson both reveals information and creates mysteries, alternately exposing and obscuring imagery and narratives in a process of discovery. Also on view are a series of cast aluminum sculptures that begin as subconscious finger drawings or tracings in sand. The resulting forms are reminiscent of ant tunnels, fossils, text, or spells. Similarly, images on glass set in irregular ceramic frames are coaxed into being through a process of drawing and redrawing using silver nitrate. Reflecting back onto us are partial, ghostly spirit reflections that feel as if they are in flux—simultaneously appearing or disappearing.

Rose Dickson (b. 1989, Portland, OR; lives and works in Chicago, IL) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012 and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Dickson lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Dickson has been an artist in residence at MacDowell in Peterborough, NH; Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL; and Organhaus Art Space in Chongqing, China

Ryan McLaughlin:
Calcium Hat
April 2–May 7, 2022

Adams and Ollman is presenting Calcium Hat, a solo exhibition with Ryan McLaughlin. The exhibition includes a new suite of acrylic and gouache works on panel along with a selection of small oil paintings.

McLaughlin’s paintings feature fragmented words and crumbled pictograms hovering against dusty visual fields that fuse interpretations of still-life, landscape, and abstraction. Toggling between subjective symbols and known signifiers, McLaughlin works to extract a complex coherence between psychic unease and disambiguated aesthetic pleasure. His rich and varied surfaces present an ostensibly traditional format, one grounded in color, texture, shape, but with chance registrations that simultaneously suggest and dissect the visual proposition. It is from this familiar locus that McLaughlin continues to build his idiosyncratic cache of signage that navigates a fugitive space between aesthetic tension, definition, and playful provocation. Expanding on his 2017 exhibition with the gallery titled Prius Wig, McLaughlin’s new work channels concepts of augmented anatomy, artificial lighting, and modified botany, markers of our new era.

Ryan McLaughlin (born 1980, Worcester, MA where he lives and works) received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Solo exhibitions include Impreza Earth, David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis, MN; TraffiQ, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London; Lacus PM, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Raisins, Laurel Gitlen, New York City; and Barbara (I and II) at Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin. McLaughlin’s work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at Sperone Westwater, Metro Pictures, Sikkema Jenkins, all New York; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Off Vendome, Dusseldorf.